Wow: Jackson County Voters Say No To Research Tax By Five-To-One Margin

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

We had our concerns about Question 1 in Jackson County, a proposal that would have imposed a half-cent sales tax for medical research in the county. Given the size and duration of the tax along with its beneficiaries, it was certainly plausible that residents might reject it, but I don’t think David Stokes or I expected that voters would reject the tax by a five-to-one margin.

In complete unofficial returns, 12,066 voters supported the tax, roughly 16 percent of those casting ballots, while 64,486, or 84 percent, opposed it.

The early returns were so decisive that supporters conceded defeat long before the final votes were announced.

“It was an effort very much worth fighting,” a somber Russ Welsh, past chairman of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, told a crowd of about 50 supporters gathered at Union Station.

While voters did not agree with the funding mechanism, he and others said the campaign had been successful in educating the public about the promises of translational research.

Kansas City residents already live under an enormous sales tax burden — a burden so heavy that some local districts already feature a sales tax well in excess of 10 percent. The research tax would have exacerbated sales tax problems in Jackson County.

This was the right move for Jackson County residents. Let’s just hope that the Kansas City area has reached its peak sales tax and will start lightening the region’s tax burdens going forward, rather than piling on more.

On Transit, Kansas City Looks Backward

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

Subject to a possible contract rebid, Kansas City’s political leadership seems on the brink of accomplishing something that has eluded them for years: building a rail transit system in downtown. It only took a decade of study, multiple defeats at the ballot box, and overcoming a lawsuit or two to realize their dream of using 19th century technology to meet 21st century needs.

But elsewhere in the country, forward-looking urban areas are using new technology to meet transportation needs. The TechCrunch website recently published a piece about the purchase of 2,500 driverless cars by Uber, a vehicles-for-hire service with fleets around the country. The cars, built by Google and now in their third generation, are described this way:

Due to its low weight and the latest in fuel cell technology, the GX3200 can get up to 750 miles of travel on a single charge, or about 48 hours on standby mode. Like Google’s other autonomous vehicles, the GX3200 is designed to find and dock in the nearest Google PowerUP station whenever it’s not in use.

In contrast to light rail, the rapidly progressing leaps in driverless car and cycling technology are allowing people more freedom and choices in how they get from point A to B. Indeed, the future of transportation is in flexibility, not inflexibility. Google driverless cars allow for cheap and easy transit while respecting individual freedom. In several places, state legislatures have altered their traffic laws to allow for such cars.

Why can’t Kansas City be at the bleeding edge of this transportation revolution instead of celebrating the transportation equivalent of erecting telegraph lines? Kansas City is one of the earliest adopters of Google Fiber (which, by the way, was brought to us by small efficient government, not large bureaucratic government). We ought to be looking to the future for our transit needs and championing the things that people want: individually tailored service, ease of use and convenience — and provided by the market because the people demand it, not the government because politicians do.

The fixed rail they will be installing downtown offers none of that flexibility or popular appeal. Rails do not take passengers where they want to go; rail takes people where city planners want or need them to go (not to mention a car ride to the stations in most cases).

To add insult to injury, the rail system that is being built likely will be abandoned by the hip urbanite core that it is meant to attract as soon as something sexier comes along … like a Google car.

Patrick Tuohey is the western Missouri field manager at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

Public Schools Do Not Serve All Students

Posted on by James V. Shuls

As first appearing in Education News on October 22, 2013:

One of the great myths in education today is that all public schools serve all students. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nevertheless, opponents of school choice make frequent use of this falsehood in arguing against any expenditure of public money to help disadvantaged students attend private schools. They argue: “If private schools do not serve every student, they should not get tax dollars.” It is time to set the record straight: individual schools — whether public or private — do not serve all students. Nor should they.

One prime example of a public school that does not serve all students is Metro Academic and Classical High School, a magnet school in the Saint Louis Public School District. U.S. News & World Report ranks Metro as the No. 1 public school in the state, for good reason. Metro grads regularly go on to top-tier universities and perform exceptionally well on achievement tests.

There may be great things going on at Metro, but it cannot be denied that part of the school’s success is derived from its admissions process. To be admitted, a student must score proficient or advanced on the state MAP test. In 2013, nearly 14 percent of black eighth graders in Saint Louis scored proficient or advanced. That means more than 86 percent of black students in the Saint Louis Public School District do not meet the admissions criteria for Metro.

The Saint Louis Public School District has more than 25 magnet schools. Though most do not have admission standards as rigorous as those at Metro, they typically do have some requirements. By design, these admission standards keep students out.

Though they may not have magnet schools or a selective admissions process, other area districts do have special schools designed to serve their most disabled, disturbed, and/or disruptive students.

In 1992, the Parkway School District opened Fern Ridge High School. The school is designed to help “tenth through twelfth grade students, including those with disabilities, succeed when conventional methods have failed.” Students who cannot make it in the general population can be transferred to Fern Ridge. In other words, individual Parkway high schools do not serve all students.

Parkway is not alone in having a special school for students with unique challenges. In 1957, the Special School District (SSD) of Saint Louis County was established. It “was the net result of years of hard work and advocacy by parents of children whose educational needs were not being met by the existing public school system.” Today, the SSD serves approximately 23,000 students through services provided at district-run schools, independent sites, and two technical high schools.

Other students with disabilities attend the Missouri School for the Blind, the School for the Deaf, or use the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MoVIP) at home.

The bottom line is that individual schools do not serve all students. That is a good thing. There are great benefits that come from having highly specialized schools that are skilled at educating special students. Bright, gifted students are challenged and receive a tremendous education at Metro High. Students with special needs are encouraged and given the tools to succeed at Fern Ridge. By specializing, these schools are able to provide students with a better education than they might have received in a traditional school.

It is ridiculous to expect individual private schools to serve all students when individual public schools do not fulfill this task. Rather than place unrealistic expectations on private schools, or public schools for that matter, we should work to give every child access to the school that is going to best meet their needs. That may be a traditional district-run school, a magnet school, a special school, a charter school, and yes, even a private school.

Through school choice, every student can be served. As Milton Friedman once wrote, “The injection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools.” Isn’t that what we really need — a healthy variety of schools that can meet the unique needs of each of our students?

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

 

How The Kansas City Star Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Streetcar

Posted on by Joseph Miller

A recent Kansas City Star editorial trumpets the success of the downtown streetcar and supports planning new routes, even though it hasn’t been completed. The article accuses the opposition to new streetcar planning of wasting time. However, why should Kansas City spend more money planning to expand the streetcar when 1) streetcars do not improve transit; 2) there is no evidence that streetcars drive development; and 3) the original line has yet to open, much less prove its usefulness?

Streetcars will not improve mobility for public transit users in Kansas City. They travel at about the same speed as current city buses, 7-12 mph. Although a streetcar’s capacity is higher than buses, each space on a streetcar costs three times a space in the new green energy buses that Kansas City is planning to purchase. That number doesn’t include the costs of streetcar infrastructure, which will exceed $1 million per mile. In addition, streetcar lines are inflexible, meaning they cannot respond to changing customer demands or shifting demographic patterns.

Most proponents of the streetcar are aware that they make no improvements in terms of actually providing mobility, and never present a strong argument to the contrary. While most transportation systems are designed to move people to different parts of a city, a streetcar’s purpose is to move money to a single, preferred section of the city. The great weaknesses of the system — high fixed costs and minimal flexibility — become supposed strengths as investment moves to streetcar corridors.

While it may be true that giving special tax breaks and pouring investment into specific sections of a city can increase local development (albeit at the expense of other sections of the city and other taxpayers), there is no evidence that streetcars increase development, aside from anecdote. In fact, the streetcar’s own grant application openly states that downtown development has already exceeded $5 billion since 2002 without a streetcar. If Kansas City can achieve development without an expensive streetcar system, why build it in the first place?

It is entertaining to see a charge of waste from those who would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a transit system that will lose money and not increase mobility. Perhaps if streetcar proponents adequately considered the wastefulness of their own activities, they would have no opponents to denigrate.

Collective Bargaining + Tenure = More Teacher Layoffs In Normandy

Posted on by James V. Shuls

The Normandy School District is in a tough place financially. The inter-district transfer program is taking its toll and the district may spend as much as 30 percent of its budget on student transfers. To make up for the loss of revenue, the district is looking to make cuts to reduce expenditures. Normandy will lay off 103 employees: 71 teachers, 27 support staff, and five building administrators. These cuts, along with the closing of Bel-Nor Elementary and other changes, are projected to save the district more than $3 million.

There is no doubt that the Normandy School District needed to cut some teachers. However, the number of teachers laid off in Normandy will be higher because of state tenure laws and the district’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the Normandy National Education Association. Both state statutes (RSMo 168.124) and the CBA dictate that new teachers must be laid off before tenured teachers.

When districts engage in these seniority-based layoff policies, instead of a policy based on the effectiveness of the teacher, they ultimately lay off more teachers. A new teacher makes less money than an experienced teacher, although they may or may not be more effective.

The average teacher salary in Normandy last year was just more than $60,000, but a non-tenured teacher with four years of experience earns little more than $40,000. That means the district would have to lay off 1.5 non-tenured teachers to equal the salary of one of the district’s average teachers.

Let’s put this into perspective. The district is laying off 71 teachers. If the laid off teachers represented the average teacher, the district would save nearly $4.3 million in annual salaries. If they laid off all novice teachers with four years of experience, they would cut less than $2.9 million in annual salaries — a difference of more than $1.4 million.

The “last in, first out” policies enshrined in state law and in the district’s CBA will undoubtedly lead to larger class sizes than having a policy based on merit.

Salary Schedule for Normandy 2012-13

Uh Oh: Are The Exchanges Goosing State Medicaid Rolls?

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

With the failings of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a backdrop, the Missouri House Interim Committee on Medicaid Transformation met over the last two days to discuss whether the state should expand Medicaid under that very law. Much of the media’s focus so far has been on the abject failure of the ACA’s website, but for those who have logged onto an insurance exchange successfully, often it’s not private insurance they’re coming away with — it’s Medicaid. [Emphasis mine.]

The disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov may have another serious problem: A CBS News analysis shows that in many of the 15 state-based health insurance exchanges more people are enrolling in Medicaid rather than buying private health insurance. And if that trend continues, there’s concern there won’t be enough healthy people buying health insurance for the system to work….

CBS News has confirmed that in Washington, of the more than 35,000 people newly enrolled, 87 percent signed up for Medicaid. In Kentucky, out of 26,000 new enrollments, 82 percent are in Medicaid. And in New York, of 37,000 enrollments, Medicaid accounts for 64 percent. And there are similar stories across the country in nearly half of the states that run their own exchanges.

So the exchanges, billed as a private market solution to America’s health care problems, appear to be putting more people into a long-broken government program than into private insurance. That’s a huge contradiction in policy and puffery that undercuts the entire law. What assurances do taxpayers have that individuals aren’t being improperly added to the Medicaid program? And why would any legislature expand Medicaid just as Obamacare is boosting the program’s cost to the states?

Don’t Feed The Blob: An Open Letter To The Editor About Government’s Spooky Growth

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

To the Editor:

For those of us who like a good old-fashioned scare, this time of year is a real (trick or) treat. Halloween stories of ghouls, goblins, and ghosts make for a fun annual tradition, safely delivering in fiction what would be truly frightening in fact.

Yet while it does not wear a hockey mask or carry a cleaver, Missouri state government is a scary story in its own right. Today, the state spends taxpayer money at a rate of almost $800 a second, and if the fate of last year’s tax cut is any indication, it’s more likely that this spending will rise than fall. In fact, if some legislators have their way, next year, the state will throw billions more into an already broken Medicaid program. The state seems to be just like the creature from the 1950s horror film “The Blob” — growing and covering Missourians in regulations and burdens as it goes along.

Instead of feeding The Blob, the legislature should take a different approach and return power to the People — through tax cuts and other free-market, people-powered reforms. The Blob was defeated when people united to turn back its growth; defeating big government will require a similar commitment from Missourians.

Patrick Ishmael
Policy Analyst
Show-Me Institute

Portland’s (And Kansas City’s) Streetcar Collapse

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

A television station in Portland, Ore., reported that the city’s ever-expanding streetcar system is losing money.

Streetcar service and routes are expanding, and this week Portland Mayor Charlie Hales floated the idea of expanding streetcar lines east of Martin Luther King Boulevard. But last year the Portland Streetcar collected less than half the fare revenue they expected. That meant the Portland Bureau of Transportation ended up helping finance streetcar operations to the tune of $200,000. In fact, over the last five years, PBOT has increased its yearly streetcar spending by more than $2 million.

“The city of Portland has kicked in sufficient money to maintain our operating level,” said Portland Streetcar Executive Director Rick Gustafson.

You read that right, city officials want to expand streetcar service despite the fact that fare revenue is less than half of what they budgeted. As a result, the city has to fund the effort out of its general revenue.

But Eric Fruits, an urban economics professor at Portland State University, calls the streetcar “a money pit.”

“I think what we need to do now is figure out a way to reduce that deficit as much as possible so that we’re not taking money out of the general fund,” Fruits told KOIN 6 News.

The board is considering raising the streetcar fare from $1 to $2.50, but others fear that such an increase will further dampen revenue. Incredibly, the story goes on to say that streetcar proponents are  “convinced the changes, while expensive, are worth it no matter who pays for it in the long run.”

Does anyone doubt that this will be the case in Kansas City? The Kansas City streetcar is currently slated to be free to ride, just as Portland’s was. But when the bill gets too large, Kansas City will start charging a fee, just like Portland did in 2011. The result in Kansas City, as it was in Portland, will be fewer riders, even though in Portland the routes were expanded. The city will be on the hook for the cost and — as has been the case all over the country — the transit authorities will start taking money from successful and cheap bus transportation.

Just as in Portland, count on Kansas City’s streetcar supporters to remain steadfast, no matter who pays for it in the long run. Talk about being taken for a ride.

Governor Nixon And Higher Education

Posted on by Rik W. Hafer

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon recently stated that “education is the best economic development tool available.” He is correct: an educated work force is an important ingredient to economic growth. Sadly, it also helps explain why Missouri’s record of economic growth gets a failing grade.

In a recent Saint Louis Beacon editorial, I noted that budget decisions have reduced funding for higher education. Spending on higher education has declined in real terms since 1990. This has had several effects, including forcing Missouri universities and colleges to raise tuition. It also has affected the educational accomplishment of the average Missourian.

How does Missouri stack up when compared to other states in educational achievement by its citizens? In 2008, Missouri ranked 33rd out of the 50 states using the statistic “percent of adults having a bachelor’s degree or more.” Don’t like “number of degrees” as a measure of what you have learned? Using standardized test scores (the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) as a measure of educational attainment, Stanford University professor Eric Hanushek recently reported that since 1992, the gain in NAEP test scores for Missouri relative to other states is unimpressive.  On this score, Missouri ranks 27th out of 41 states for which data are available.

Missouri’s lackluster educational record is one of several factors that has negatively affected our economic standard of living. In a 2012 Show-Me Institute study, SMI economists Joseph Haslag and Michael Podgursky reported that Missouri’s economy expanded at a slower pace than any of its neighbors since 1997. Compared to all 50 states, Missouri ranked 48th in terms of economic growth. Even in a world of social promotion, this is not a passing record of achievement.

Nixon has called for additional funds for higher education in the fiscal year 2015 budget. Whether these funds survive the political battlefield and find their way to colleges and universities is a dubious proposition. Nor do I mean to suggest that simply throwing more dollars at education is the answer to improving the situation. One thing is certain, however: Unless Missouri’s educational report card improves in the coming years, do not expect to experience an economic boom any time soon.

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